I am extremely fortunate to get invited to Matfield Outpost’s Artist Residency. This place is a dream of expansive green prairie, serene dirt roads, and continuous freight trains all wrapped up into a town of 47 residents.

I arrived late Sunday after an unusually eventful drive from NYC where my old car finally gave up and I had to buy a new one. When I arrived at Matfield Green I was greeted by the most charming green house with vivid blue floors. My bedroom was bright and airy with a cheerful yellow duvet that would guarantee a great night’s sleep.

My dogs love the place. They raced to the single room studio behind the house to “help” me set up my materials. Whenever I travel I do not know what kind of work I will make, but I always bring my watercolor pad. I began working by cutting up some linoleum block prints I brought along and some pre-1950′s Italian printed papers which a colleague gave to me.

The first piece I made is a collage of cut flowers from the Italian paper with details of blue and green, seemingly the only colors of the surrounding landscape, more greens and blues than you could ever imagine go on for miles.

Exploring the surrounding area I found this to be one of my favorite roads, a 60 mile dirt loop road of open range cattle grazing. There are endless places to explore, nearby lakes and the Flint Hills Tall Grass National Preserve. This weekend there is a Rodeo, a parade and a 5k/10k race in Strong City, just a few miles away.

This past week has been quite dreamy. I feel right at home in the cozy studio working on my Flint Hills Series of watercolors. I love walking from the house to the studio and then settling in to work.

The best part is having my dogs with me. We spent a lot of time out walking the hills and they stayed close by me when I was working.

It has been fantastic hanging out with Ton Haak and Ans Zoutenbier the Directors of the Gallery at Pioneer Bluff. And the good news is that I will be back in October for my own exhibition with opens on October 4th.

Today I walked just over seven miles at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. This place is beautiful and scary. It is part of the 170,000,000 acres of tallgrass prairie. The national park has over 40 miles of trail where you have to cross through cattle and bison fields. While I wanted to see wild bison I am glad I didn’t as I would have been afraid, I was terrified of the cattle, especially being 4-5 miles out in the prairie all alone. Three times I had to cross the path covered in cattle, one time they started trotting toward me and I was sweating like mad because I did not know how to get them to go the other way.

But if you can handle walking through the cattle you are in for a real treat, it is a sea of green for miles in every direction.

I am packing up all my stuff tonight and photographing the last of the work I made. It is to bad I only have my cell phone camera, my nice Canon A100 (or could be nice) is broken again. This has been the worst camera I ever owned, first I got lens errors, now the shutter will not work, it was an expensive disappointment. But I have my cell phone to show you some of my work, these are all watercolor with collage of Italian printed papers, they are 12″ x 16″. I can’t wait to come back, Matfield Outpost is the most awesome place!